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Airlines canceling record number of flights this winter

Does it seem like there's a new round of calamitous flight disruptions every time you check the news? It's not your imagination. U.S. airlines are cancelling flights in numbers not seen since the late 1980s,

Anna Maksimkina of Yekaterinburg, Russia, sleeps on the floor at New York's JFK airport after a Delta flight from Toronto to New York skidded off a runway and into a snow bank, temporarily halting all flights on Jan. 5, 2014. Kathy Willens, AP

Passenger Hossam Shalaby, from Egypt, waits for his rescheduled flight to Orlando under a departure board showing hundreds of cancellations at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Feb. 11, 2014. David Tulis, AP

The baggage claim area at Norfolk International Airport is virtually empty on Jan. 29, 2014. Most flights in and out of the airport are either canceled or delayed because of heavy snow. The' N. Pham, AP

Near white out conditions at Forbes field airport in Topeka, Kan. didn't keep workers from clearing the tarmac and runway on Feb. 4, 2014, in preparation for a United Express flight from Chicago. Thad Allton, AP

Passengers walk through a nearly deserted ticketing area after Delta Air Lines cancelled 573 flights and Southwest Airlines suspended most operations into and out of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in advance of an ice storm on Feb. 11, 2014. David Tulis, AP

Drew Brown, left, and Matt Robbins, right, of Denver, sleep on the floor at LaGaurdia airport after their flight was canceled in the wake of heavy snow following the Super Bowl on Feb. 3, 2014. John Minchillo, AP

Plows clearsnow from a gate at La Guardia airport on Feb. 3, 2014, in New York. Winter weather snarled the travel plans for thousands of fliers leaving the New York area after the Super Bowl. John Minchillo AP

A snowplow works as snow falls Feb. 3, 2014, at Newark Liberty International Airport. A winter storm cancelled or delayed dozens of flights in the region the day after the Super Bowl. Ted S. Warren, AP

Canceled flights weren't the only winter-weather problems for fliers. This couple had to navigate heavy snow to get from a parking lot to the terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport on Jan. 3, 2014. Julio Cortez, AP

A unidentified woman rests on her luggage as she waits in the baggage area of Terminal 2 at New York JFK on Jan. 5, 2014. An earlier flight from Toronto to New York skidded off the runway into a snow bank, snarling the airport's operations. Kathy Willens, AP

More than 75,000 domestic flights have been canceled just since Dec. 1, a staggering figure that represents 5.5% of the nation's entire 1.35-million flight schedule during that timeframe, according to information provided by flight tracking site FlightAware.

Those totals – both the raw flight numbers and the percentage of the overall schedule – represent the highest level of cancellations "since at least the winter of 1987-1988," AP writes. That was the winter that the Department of Transportation first began collecting and publishing airline cancellation data.

On Thursday alone, nearly half of the all of the flights in the United States were either delayed or canceled.

"Yesterday saw 6,533 flights cancelled and another 4,605 delayed, which amounts to nearly half of the daily schedule for passenger flights in the U.S.," Mark Duell, FlightAware's VP – Operations, says in a Friday e-mail to Today in the Sky. "It was the fifth worst day for flight cancellations we've seen in the last 3 years after the Groundhog Day Blizzard (of 2011), Hurricane Irene (2011), and Superstorm Sandy (2012)."